Team Vedha

HDB awarded Keppel a second chilled water supply contract on 15 April 2026, covering nine more Build-To-Order projects in Tengah’s Brickland, Park and Forest Hill districts. That is roughly 10,000 more households, on a 20-year contract. Add the three projects Keppel won in September 2024 and about 14,000 households across 12 Tengah projects will be offered a Centralised Cooling System instead of a conventional aircon. The number that gets repeated in every writeup is that CCS uses up to 30 per cent less energy. We went and checked what that actually costs a household, using the published rates, and the answer is not the one the number implies. What CCS is, quickly Rooftop chiller plants make chilled water. That water is piped down risers, into your flat, and through fan coil units mounted on your walls. A valve opens, water flows through the coil, a fan blows across it, the room gets cold. The warmed water goes back up to the plant. There is no condenser. Nothing on your ledge. No refrigerant in your flat at all. If you take CCS, HDB still builds you an aircon ledge, so opting out and installing a conventional system remains possible. The 30 per cent is real. It is also not your electricity bill. A big centralised chiller plant is more efficient than fifty small condensers. That is straightforward engineering and we have no quarrel with it. The catch is who that efficiency belongs to. You do not buy electricity for your cooling under CCS. You buy chilled water, at a rate the operator sets and publishes quarterly. Whatever the plant saves on energy, what lands on your bill is that rate multiplied by how much cooling you used. The efficiency of the plant is an input to how the rate gets calculated, not a discount applied to your invoice. So the honest comparison is not efficiency against efficiency. It is dollars per unit of cooling. The comparison, at today’s published rates Chilled water is metered in kilowatt-hours refrigeration, written kWrh. One kWrh is one unit of cooling delivered into your flat. SP Group’s residential chilled water rate for Tengah in Q3 2026 is 10 cents per kWrh, or 10.90 cents with GST. For a conventional aircon, the cost of one unit of cooling is the electricity price divided by the system’s coefficient of performance. COP is how many units of cooling you get per unit of electricity. Since 1 July the household electricity tariff has been 34.78 cents per kWh including GST. How the cooling is produced Cost per unit of cooling, with GST CCS chilled water, SP rate, Q3 2026 10.90 cents New 5-tick multi-split at its rated COP of 5.5 6.32 cents The same system running at a real-world COP of 4.5 7.73 cents An older or poorly maintained system at COP 3.5 9.94 cents A neglected non-inverter system at COP 3.0 11.59 cents The break-even sits at a COP of about 3.19. Above that, a conventional system delivers cooling more cheaply than CCS. Below it, CCS wins. Every multi-split system legally sold in Singapore today is rated at a COP of at least 5.50, because that is the minimum performance standard. Real-world performance is always below the rated figure, sometimes well below, but a maintained modern system does not fall to 3.19. Two things make that comparison slightly kinder to CCS than the table shows. Your fan coil unit’s fan still draws electricity, billed separately on your own account, so add a little to the CCS side. And rated COP is a lab number. Two things make it harsher. A conventional system’s COP already includes its own fans. And the tariff cuts both ways, which brings us to the interesting bit. The rate did not move on 1 July Electricity went up 17 per cent on 1 July 2026. Every household on the regulated tariff felt it. SP’s chilled water rate did not move at all. Period Rate before GST With GST Q4 2023 20.38 cents (as reported at the time) Q1 2024 13.20 cents 14.39 cents Q2 2024 12.20 cents 13.30 cents Q3 2024 through Q3 2026 10.00 cents 10.90 cents Eight consecutive quarters at 10 cents, straight through a 17 per cent jump in the electricity price. That is genuinely notable, because SP’s own published formula says the rate reflects, among other things, the prevailing residential electricity energy charge. It has not tracked it. CCS subscribers in Tengah were insulated from the tariff hike that everyone else absorbed. Before 1 July, the break-even COP was about 2.73. Now it is 3.19. The tariff rise closed a chunk of the gap without CCS households paying anything for it. But look at how that rate got to 10 cents In October 2023 the rate was 20.38 cents per kWrh. More than 150 Tengah residents signed a petition to the Prime Minister on 27 October that year, raising both the charges and the fees for cancelling. SP waived usage charges to 31 December, cut the rate to 13.2 cents from 1 January 2024, then to 12.2 cents, then to 10 cents. SP had also revised its published life-cycle savings estimate from 30 per cent down to 17 per cent before restoring the 30 per cent figure once the rate came down. One resident quoted in The Straits Times at the time made the point better than we can. If the operator can move the rate that far that fast, what stops it moving again. Nothing does. The rate is reviewed quarterly and the formula includes electricity, water prices, water borne fees, the Consumer Price Index, and the capital and operating cost of the plant. That is a lot of moving parts, and unlike the electricity tariff, there is no EMA sitting over it setting the methodology in public. The stability since mid-2024 has been good for subscribers. It is not the same thing as a guarantee. If you are buying now, you are not dealing with SP This is

On 28 May 2026 NEA announced a new set of measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions from refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment. Within days we started getting the question, usually some version of the same one. Is R32 being banned. Will my unit become illegal. Should I replace it before the rule kicks in. No, no, and no. Here is what the announcement actually covers, and then the part of this story that does concern you, which nobody has written about. What changed, and for whom NEA sets a ceiling on the Global Warming Potential of the refrigerant that equipment uses. GWP is a number comparing how much a gas warms the atmosphere against carbon dioxide, which sits at 1. Lower is better. Equipment GWP limit In force from Household split aircon up to 17.6 kW, inverter and non-inverter 750 1 October 2022 Household refrigerators up to 900 litres 15 1 October 2022 Water-cooled chillers of 1,055 kW and above 15 1 October 2022 Centralised commercial refrigeration, the kind supermarkets run 150 1 July 2027 Passenger cabin aircon in new cars, taxis and light goods vehicles 150 1 July 2028 Read the first row again. The limit on your home aircon came into force nearly four years ago. Nothing about it changed in May. What NEA announced were the last two rows, plus transport refrigeration, plus a registration and disposal framework for the companies that install, maintain and decommission those systems, starting 1 July 2027. Supermarket chillers. Cold rooms. Refrigerated trucks. Car aircon. None of that is on your ledge. Why your unit already complies The GWP limit for a household split system is 750. R32 has a GWP of 675, so it clears. R410A, the refrigerant that dominated before, sits at 2,088, so it does not. That is the entire reason R32 took over the Singapore market. Not because anyone mandated R32 specifically, whatever you may have read. NEA set a number and R32 is the refrigerant the manufacturers reached for that comes in under it. If someone develops something cheaper with a GWP of 400 tomorrow, that clears the same bar. This distinction matters, because the version going around, that NEA mandates R32 for new single-split installations, is wrong in a way that leads people to the wrong conclusion. A ceiling on GWP is not a ban on everything except one gas. It is a ceiling. There is also a line on NEA’s own page that settles the anxiety completely. Goods supplied before the effective date are not affected. Your R410A unit from 2018 is legal, it stays legal, and you can keep servicing it and topping it up for as long as it makes sense to. So if someone quotes you for a refrigerant compliance upgrade They are selling you something that does not exist. We have not seen this yet in Singapore, but we have seen the equivalent after every regulatory announcement for the past decade. A rule lands, it gets summarised badly, and somebody turns the confusion into a job. If a technician tells you your home aircon needs converting, retrofitting or replacing because of the May announcement, ask them which row of that table applies to a residential split unit. There isn’t one. Now the part that does concern you Here is what we found reading NEA’s framework properly, and it is not what we expected. NEA has a category called regulated GHG works. If your company installs, maintains or decommissions certain equipment, you must register with NEA as a GHG entity, follow set procedures, recover the spent refrigerant instead of releasing it, send it to an NEA-authorised treatment facility, and keep records that NEA can inspect. Fines run to $10,000 and, for some offences, up to three months’ imprisonment. Which equipment is on that list? Water-cooled chillers, since October 2022. From July 2027, centralised commercial refrigeration, industrial cold rooms, car and LGV aircon, and transport refrigeration units. Household air-conditioning is not on that list. There are obligations further down the chain. Under the Resource Sustainability Act, e-waste recyclers have to remove refrigerants with a GWP above 15 from the equipment they process. Refrigerant treatment facilities need a Toxic Industrial Waste Collector licence from NEA. So the destination is regulated. The step before that is not. When a technician removes your old System 3 from the ledge, no registration requirement, no recovery obligation and no record-keeping duty attaches to that company the way it does to a chiller contractor. Whether the R32 in your unit gets pumped into a recovery cylinder or vented into the air above the carpark comes down to that company’s own standards and the equipment in their van. We recover it. Recovery kit costs money and takes time on a job, which is exactly why not everyone does. We are not going to pretend the whole trade is disciplined about this, because it is not, and the regulation that would force the issue stops short of us. If that sounds like an odd thing for an aircon company to put on its own website, fair enough. But you asked what the news means, and this is the honest answer. The rules tightened around commercial refrigeration and left residential servicing where it was. The one thing you can actually check This is the practical takeaway and almost nobody knows it exists. R32 is mildly flammable. Because of that, SCDF requires manufacturers to ensure that service personnel working on R32 systems have completed training run by ITE, specifically the Certificate of Competency in Residential Air-Conditioning System (Refrigerant). NEA publishes the list of technicians who have completed that course. It sits on their website as a PDF, updated periodically, most recently in July 2026. You can look up the person standing in your living room. We are not suggesting you demand certification papers from every technician who walks through your door. But if you have had a bad experience, if a quote feels wrong, or if you are handing a stranger a job

Parliament passed the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill on 8 April 2026. Enforcement started on 1 July. If you bring an air-conditioner into Singapore for your own use, you now have to register it with NEA first, make sure it meets Minimum Energy Performance Standards, and make sure it carries the energy label. Get it wrong and the fine reaches $10,000 per import. That sounds alarming. For most people reading this, it changes nothing at all. Here is the part the headlines have been skipping. What was actually broken MEPS and the energy labelling scheme have been running since 2009. They applied to importers, manufacturers and suppliers, meaning the shops and the distributors. If a business wanted to sell you an aircon in Singapore, that model had to be registered and had to clear a minimum efficiency bar. Nothing covered the person who bought the unit themselves and shipped it in. Speaking at the second reading on 7 April, Senior Minister of State Dr Janil Puthucheary put it plainly. Regulated goods from local suppliers faced compliance requirements while identical goods imported for own use did not. He also said the volume of such imports may currently be small, but that online marketplaces have made it much easier for consumers to bring goods in directly. He mentioned something else worth knowing. Since 2023, NEA has been working with Lazada and Shopee to voluntarily take down listings of non-compliant regulated goods. That has been happening quietly for three years. What changed on 1 July is that it now has teeth, and the Minister can make regulations compelling platforms with a Singapore business presence to remove non-compliant listings. Who this hits and who it does not Your situation Does the new rule apply to you? Buying from a local shop, showroom or aircon company No. The supplier carries the obligation, same as always. Buying from a Singapore-based seller on Shopee or Lazada No. They are the supplier. Buying from a cross-border seller who ships direct to you from overseas Yes. You are the importer. Ordering from Taobao, or shipping a unit down from Malaysia or Japan yourself Yes. Buying a second-hand or used unit No. NEA has excluded second-hand goods, because assessing MEPS compliance on them is impractical. Bringing in a unit for a business you own, to use in your own premises Yes. Companies importing for own use are covered too. Read that table again if you skimmed it. The distinction is not what you bought. It is whether you were the one who brought it into the country. What registration actually involves NEA has made this deliberately cheap. Local suppliers pay around $70 per model to register. For end users the fee is waived entirely, because a household cannot spread that cost across hundreds of units. Dr Janil put the effective compliance cost at roughly $1 per unit. You register online through NEA’s ELS portal using your Singpass. You need a test report on NEA’s own template, and you can rely on test reports from the overseas supplier or manufacturer rather than paying for fresh testing. If a third-party lab did the testing, you need their ISO/IEC 17025 certificate and their accreditation to the relevant test standards. Where the unit uses a flammable refrigerant you may also need in-principle approval from SCDF. The certificate of registration lasts three years. Everything on that list is doable. Notice, though, how much of it depends on the overseas seller giving you a proper test report. That is where this quietly falls apart, and we will come back to it. Our verdict: the paperwork is not the reason to skip this We have been asked about imported units for years, long before this rule existed, and our answer has not changed. The registration requirement is the least of your problems. Here is what actually goes wrong. The unit may not run on Singapore power. Japanese domestic models are built for a 100 volt supply. Singapore runs at 230 volts. That unit does not work here without a transformer, and even with one you are running equipment outside what the manufacturer designed for. Units from China and Malaysia are electrically compatible at 220 to 240 volts, so this one only catches people buying from Japan, but it catches them badly. The unit was tuned for a different climate. A split system sold in northern China or Japan is designed to spend part of its year heating. Its control logic, its defrost behaviour and its compressor mapping all assume a temperature range Singapore never sees. Running that hardware at 32 degrees ambient, twelve months a year, at high humidity, is not what the engineers had in mind. Nobody will warrant it. The Singapore agent’s warranty covers units supplied through the Singapore agent. A parallel import is not that. When the compressor fails in year three you are dealing with a seller in another country, in another language, with a shipping bill for a part that weighs more than the shipping is worth. Parts take weeks, or never arrive. This is the one that bites hardest. We service Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic and the rest because parts for the Singapore models sit in local stock. A PCB for a model that was never sold here is a special order at best. Your installer may decline the job. Ours does, on some units, and we tell customers why rather than quietly overcharging for the risk. If we cannot get parts and cannot stand behind the equipment, taking the installation job means taking responsibility for something we cannot fix. So the honest read on this regulation is that it protects buyers more than it restricts them. It closes a gap that was mostly being used by people who did not understand what they were taking on. The government’s own framing is about energy efficiency and life-cycle cost, and that is fair, but the practical effect is that fewer people end up with a unit nobody in Singapore can service. The second-hand gap Worth noting, because

The Ministry of Finance confirmed on 13 August that over 2.4 million adult Singapore citizens will receive between $400 and $600 in cash from 9 September. It was announced at Budget 2026 as $200 to $400, then raised in the Ministerial Statement of 7 April, the same statement that dealt with the Middle East conflict and the energy crisis that pushed your July electricity bill up 17 per cent. It is paid per person, not per household. Two eligible adults under one roof means $800 to $1,200 arriving in the same week. You can already guess what the aircon showrooms are going to do with that. So before the promotions start, here is the arithmetic, including one thing about the 5-tick label that almost nobody in this industry explains correctly. What is actually landing, and when Support Amount When Enhanced B2026 Cost-of-Living Special Payment $400 to $600 per eligible adult From 9 September 2026 GST Voucher U-Save, doubled tranche Up to $190 by flat type Paid July 2026 U-Save across the full financial year Up to $570 by flat type April, July, October 2026 and January 2027 Climate Vouchers $400 per eligible household Claimable now, valid to 31 December 2027 CDC Vouchers $500 per household January 2027 Eligibility for the September payment: Singapore citizens aged 21 or older in 2026, owning no more than one property, with Assessable Income for Year of Assessment 2025 of up to $100,000. The Annual Value of your home affects which end of the range you land on. You do not need to apply. One piece of admin worth doing this week. Link your NRIC to PayNow by 30 August and the money reaches you on 9 September. Leave it and you wait longer. Now the part about 5 ticks Climate Vouchers can go towards twelve categories of energy and water efficient products. For air-conditioners, the condition is that the unit must be 5-tick. Every article you read about this treats that as a meaningful hurdle. Buy the efficient one, get the voucher. Sounds like the scheme is steering you towards a better product. Go and look at NEA’s actual tick rating table for air-conditioners and you find something different. Aircon type Which tick bands exist Casement and window 2, 3, 4 and 5-tick Single-split, non-inverter 4 and 5-tick only Single-split, inverter 4 and 5-tick only Multi-split, non-inverter 5-tick only Multi-split, inverter 5-tick only A multi-split system is what almost every HDB flat and condo in Singapore actually has. System 2, System 3, System 4. One outdoor condenser feeding several indoor fancoils. For those systems, NEA’s table has no 1-tick, 2-tick, 3-tick or 4-tick band. It does not exist. The minimum performance standard for a multi-split inverter is a weighted COP above 5.50, and 5 ticks starts at a weighted COP of 5.50. They are the same number. Which means every new System 2, 3 or 4 you can legally buy in Singapore is 5-tick. It has to be. There is nothing else on the shelf. So when a retailer tells you their System 3 qualifies for your Climate Voucher because it is 5-tick, they are describing a legal requirement, not a feature. Any System 3 they could sell you would qualify. What the label does tell you, if you read the right number This is the useful bit. COP stands for coefficient of performance. It is how many units of cooling you get for each unit of electricity you put in. Higher is better. For inverter units, NEA uses a weighted COP, which blends the unit’s efficiency at full load and at half load, because a real aircon spends most of its life running at part load. The 5-tick band starts at 5.50 and has no ceiling. So two System 3 units sitting side by side in the same showroom, both wearing five ticks, might have weighted COPs of 5.55 and 6.80. That is roughly a 20 per cent difference in how much electricity they draw for the same cooling, and the label gives them identical tick counts. Stop counting ticks. Read the COP figure printed on the label and compare that instead. On a multi-split it is the only number on there doing any work. The payback maths, at 34.78 cents Since 1 July the regulated household tariff has been 34.78 cents per kWh including GST. Take a new 5-tick System 3, installed, at the current market range of roughly $3,000 to $4,000. Call it $3,200 and knock off the $400 Climate Voucher. Net cost $2,800. What you have now Aircon use per month New unit’s use Monthly saving Time to pay back $2,800 System 3, 12 years old, servicing neglected around 350 kWh around 225 kWh about $43 about 5.4 years System 3, 6 to 8 years old, 5-tick, maintained around 260 kWh around 225 kWh about $12 about 19 years Old single-split non-inverter units around 300 kWh around 200 kWh about $35 about 6.7 years These are estimates from typical draw figures rather than measurements of your flat. Your numbers will differ. Look at the second row. A 19-year payback on equipment that lasts twelve to fifteen years means the unit dies before it has paid for itself. That is not a close call. The first and third rows are defensible. A twelve-year-old system is heading for a compressor failure anyway, and 5.4 years against a replacement you were going to make regardless is a reasonable trade. A number going around that does not survive contact with a calculator Several sites are currently telling Singaporeans that upgrading from an old system to a 5-tick saves $30 to $50 a month with a payback period of 18 to 24 months. The savings figure is roughly right for a genuinely old system. The payback figure is not close. At $50 a month, 24 months of savings comes to $1,200. Nobody is installing a System 3 for $1,200 after the voucher. To pay back $2,800 net at $50 a month takes 56 months.

SP Group announced on 30 June that household electricity tariffs would rise 17 per cent for the quarter running 1 July to 30 September 2026. That is 4.64 cents more per kilowatt hour before GST. The regulated household rate is now 31.91 cents per kWh, or 34.78 cents once you add the 9 per cent GST. Highest it has ever been. We started getting calls in the third week of July, when the first affected bills landed. Most followed the same script. The bill jumped, the aircon is the obvious suspect, and someone at work or in a Facebook group has already suggested the unit is old and inefficient and should be replaced. Before you spend two thousand dollars on that theory, here is the arithmetic. What actually changed 1 Apr to 30 Jun 2026 1 Jul to 30 Sep 2026 Change Rate before GST 27.27 cents/kWh 31.91 cents/kWh +4.64 cents Rate with 9% GST 29.72 cents/kWh 34.78 cents/kWh +5.06 cents Five cents. That is the whole story, repeated across every unit of electricity your home uses. SP’s own figure is that the average monthly bill for a four-room HDB household goes up by $17.14 before GST, so about $18.68 with it. That covers everything in the flat, not just the aircon. One thing worth checking before you read further. This tariff is the regulated rate. If you signed up with a retailer under the Open Electricity Market and you are on a fixed price plan, your rate did not move on 1 July. Plenty of people who called us about their July bill were on retailer plans and looking at a completely different cause. Check which one you are on before you blame the aircon. What it costs on your aircon specifically These are estimates built from typical power draw on modern split systems in Singapore homes. Your unit will differ depending on room size, insulation, how many people are in the room and what temperature you set. Treat them as a range, not a reading. How you run it Rough aircon use per month Cost before 1 July Cost from 1 July Extra per month One 9,000 BTU fancoil, 8 hours a night around 145 kWh $43 $50 about $7 Two fancoils, 8 hours a night around 240 kWh $71 $83 about $12 Older non-inverter single unit, 8 hours a night around 215 kWh $64 $75 about $11 System 3 running hard across three rooms around 350 kWh $104 $122 about $18 So for most HDB households the tariff hike costs the aircon somewhere between seven and eighteen dollars a month. That is real money. It is also nowhere near what people think it is when they open the bill, and it is nowhere near enough to justify a replacement system. The part nobody explains: why July and not March Here is the bit that confuses everyone, and it is worth understanding because it tells you what happens next. The Middle East conflict started on 28 February this year. Global fuel prices went up almost immediately. So why did the April tariff barely move, rising only 2.1 per cent, and then July jump 17 per cent? Because of how the tariff is calculated. SP sets the energy cost portion using average natural gas prices from the first two and a half months of the preceding quarter. The April to June tariff was priced off gas from 1 January to 15 March, which only caught about two weeks of the spike. The July to September tariff was priced off gas from 1 April to 15 June, which caught all of it. Your July bill is not showing you today’s fuel market. It is showing you what gas cost back in spring. That lag cuts both ways, and it is the reason we are telling customers not to make a big decision this month. Where the rebates went Eligible HDB households got a double tranche of GST Voucher U-Save in July, up to $190 depending on flat type, on top of the double tranche already paid in April. Across the full financial year that comes to up to $570. It lands automatically in your SP account, which is exactly why most people miss it. There is no notification that feels like money arriving. It just quietly reduces the amount owed, and then the tariff increase eats into it, and the net effect on the bill looks like nothing happened. If you want to know whether you actually received it, look at the deductions line on your bill rather than the total. Two households can have identical usage and very different final numbers depending on flat type and eligibility. Our verdict: do not replace a working unit over this We service aircon for a living. Selling you a new system is the most profitable thing we could do off the back of this news, and we are telling you not to do it. Here is why the numbers do not support it. A new system does not reverse the tariff. You still pay 34.78 cents per kWh. All a new unit does is change how many kWh you use. If you are replacing a reasonably healthy inverter system with a newer inverter system, the consumption difference is modest, and against a System 2 replacement at two thousand dollars and up, you are looking at a payback period that runs past the point where you would have replaced the unit anyway. The replacement maths does work in two situations. If you are running a non-inverter unit, or a system past roughly ten to twelve years old where the compressor is drawing well above its rated current, the consumption gap is large enough to be worth acting on. That was true in June and it is still true now. The tariff did not change that decision, it just made it slightly more urgent. For everyone else, the honest answer is that a fifteen dollar monthly increase is not a capital expenditure problem.

Singapore is one of the most air-conditioned countries on earth, and the data proving it sits scattered across a dozen government portals, a climate research centre, a utility company and a handful of market research firms. No one has put it in one place. This page does that. Below are 133 verified statistics covering household ownership, electricity costs, the NEA rules that govern what you are allowed to buy and install, Singapore’s warming climate, the Go25 movement, district cooling, indoor air quality and consumer behaviour. Roughly four in five figures come from Singapore government sources. Where a number is global or regional, we label it. Where sources disagree, we show both. Where credible Singapore data does not exist, we say so instead of guessing. Fast facts: the 12 numbers worth quoting 1. Ownership and market size Air-conditioning went from a luxury to a default in one generation. The Household Expenditure Survey, run by the Singapore Department of Statistics, has tracked it since 1973. Note on statistics 22 and 23: the two firms disagree on the base year value and on the growth rate. Both are private estimates with undisclosed methodologies. Treat the direction of travel, steady mid-single-digit growth, as the useful signal rather than the absolute dollar figure. Chart 2 data table Dwelling type 2012/13 2023 HDB 1- and 2-room 13.5% 32.6% HDB 3-room 57.8% 70.4% HDB 4-room 75.9% 82.3% HDB 5-room and Executive 87.9% 89.4% Condominiums and other apartments 98.8% 97.8% Landed properties 97.5% 98.5% 2. Electricity and the cost of running an aircon This is the section most Singaporeans care about, because the tariff moves every quarter and the aircon is the biggest single load in the house. Chart 3 data table (cents per kWh, before GST) Quarter Tariff Quarter Tariff 1Q 2021 20.76 1Q 2024 29.89 2Q 2021 22.55 2Q 2024 29.79 3Q 2021 23.38 3Q 2024 29.88 4Q 2021 24.11 4Q 2024 29.10 1Q 2022 25.44 1Q 2025 28.12 2Q 2022 27.94 2Q 2025 28.12 3Q 2022 30.17 3Q 2025 27.47 4Q 2022 29.74 4Q 2025 27.55 1Q 2023 28.95 1Q 2026 26.71 2Q 2023 27.43 2Q 2026 27.27 3Q 2023 27.74 3Q 2026 31.91 4Q 2023 28.70 Quarters to 2Q 2026 from SingStat [15]. 3Q 2026 from SP Group [4]. 3. Energy efficiency, MEPS and the 5-tick label NEA regulates both the efficiency and the refrigerant of every household air-conditioner sold in Singapore. These are the current numbers. 4. The refrigerant transition: R22, R410A and R32 The switch you see advertised as “R32 aircon” is not marketing. It is a legal requirement driven by global warming potential limits. Chart 5 data table Regulated goods GWP limit In force from Household split air-conditioners (≤17.6 kW) 750 1 October 2022 Household refrigerators (≤900 L) 15 1 October 2022 Water-cooled chillers (≥1,055 kW) 15 1 October 2022 Centralised commercial refrigeration 150 1 July 2027 Car and LGV cabin air-conditioning 150 1 July 2028 5. Climate and heat: why demand keeps rising Singapore is warming faster than the planet as a whole. This is the strongest evidence that cooling demand is structural, not cyclical. Chart 6 data table Year Annual mean (°C) Year Annual mean (°C) 2024 28.4 2015 28.2 2019 28.4 1997 28.2 2016 28.4 2025 28.1 1998 28.3 2010 28.1 2023 28.2 2002 28.1 Chart 7 data table Scenario Very hot days per year Last 40 years (observed) 21.4 SSP1-2.6 low emissions, by 2100 41 to 125 SSP2-4.5 medium emissions, by 2100 103 to 261 SSP5-8.5 high emissions, by 2100 252 to 351 6. Go25 and national cooling policy Go25 is the clearest policy signal Singapore has sent on how households and offices should use air-conditioning. Chart 8 data table Setpoint Reduction in cooling energy use 23°C Baseline 24°C Up to 12% 25°C Up to 24% The 24% figure is the study’s “up to 12% per degree” applied across the full 23°C to 25°C range described in the source. The source states the per-degree figure directly; the cumulative figure is our arithmetic. 7. Green buildings and the cooling standards behind them 8. District cooling and the shift away from individual condensers 9. Regional cooling demand These figures are regional or global. They are included for context and labelled accordingly. 10. Health, indoor air and maintenance Singapore-specific health data on air-conditioning is thin. What exists is below, with gaps flagged honestly. 11. Consumer behaviour FAQ How much of a Singapore electricity bill is the aircon?  Air-conditioning is nearly a quarter of the average household’s energy consumption, and air-conditioner, fridge, lighting, water heater and washing machine together make up about 80% of it. [3][14] What temperature should I set my aircon to in Singapore?  The national Go25 movement asks for 25°C or above. The supporting study found up to 12% less cooling energy used for each degree raised from 23°C to 25°C, with no reported increase in discomfort. [3] Why do all new aircons use R32 instead of R410A?  Because since 1 October 2022 NEA has capped the global warming potential of refrigerants in household split air-conditioners at 750, and R410A sits above that limit. [12] What does a 5-tick aircon mean?  NEA’s label runs from 1 tick (Low) to 5 ticks (Excellent). The annual energy cost shown on the label assumes 27 cents per kWh and 8 hours of use a day. [11] Is Singapore actually getting hotter?  Yes. Mean surface air temperature has risen 0.25°C per decade since 1948, about double the global rate, and 2024 tied 2019 and 2016 as the warmest year on record at 28.4°C. [5] Methodology and about this data We gathered these figures between 22 and 29 July 2026, working outward from Singapore government primary sources: the Department of Statistics, NEA, EMA, MSS, HDB, SCDF, MSE, NCCS and SP Group. Where a blog or news article pointed to a statistic, we found and opened the original publication before including it, and we cite the original rather than the intermediary. Every statistic is dated to the year the data refers to, not